Travel Biography - Week 72.

Meeting Up with a Friend from the UK.

Not all of the five days I spent in San Francisco was I alone. There was a day when I got together with a friend who used to live near me in Bracknell, my home town, before moving across the Atlantic to San Mateo, a small Californian town around 20 miles south of San Francisco. He was friends with all my other church friends - mainly Keith, Gareth, Tim, and others. They were the same friends with whom I enjoyed a cycling trip across Holland, Belgium, and Germany in 1987, as described in Travel Biography: Week 40.

His name was Bill, and his move from the UK to California was connected with his occupation. This meeting reminded me of my other friend I stayed with at Walnut Creek in 1977, Valentine Orlando. After arriving in San Francisco, I made contact with him and a date was arranged for us to meet. 

One morning, he arrived at the hostel reception foyer and we met. After talking and finding out each other's welfare, I agreed to a car ride out from the city to call first at his home, where he lived with a female partner, and then onward along the Californian Pacific coastline.

Footbridge to Strawberry Hill, Golden Gate Park.

San Mateo looked to be a quiet residential area on the San Francisco Peninsula. San Mateo looked quite different from the bustling streets of the city. The town sits on the San Francisco Bay coastline, facing northeast into the bay. However, a 13-mile car drive southwest from San Mateo and one arrives at Half Moon Bay, on the Pacific coastline. This goes to show how huge the whole of this 60-mile-long bay is, even 20 miles south of San Francisco. From San Mateo, the bay extends further south until it ends at the city of San Jose. Hence, the whole bay, including Pablo Bay towards the north, is considered the largest coastal inlet in America. 

After socialising at his house, the two of us set out into the countryside whilst his girlfriend remained at home. Along the way, we halted at San Andreas Lake, a ribbon body of water which sits directly over the San Andreas fault line. Here is where the two tectonic plates rub against each other, causing earthquakes like the massive 9.6 magnitude one that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 - the Pacific Plate slowly moving northwest against the North American plate. This means the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego are moving very slowly northwards. 

After a while, we arrived at the Pacific coastline, and Bill drove further south until we arrived at a beach car park. After stepping out of the car, we had to walk along a footpath that passed through a thicket of bushes whose leaves left irritated the skin when touched. Bill knew about these bushes and warned me. With caution, we managed to navigate our way through safely.

The beach was sandy with some rocky stretches. There was no one else around, just the two of us as we strolled leisurely along the beach. Neither of us bathed in the sea. Despite the calmness and the sunny sky, the sea didn't look that inviting. Furthermore, and what I had considered a deterrent from any attempts to swim, were the decomposing bodies of dead seals lying here and there on the sand. One of them had its ribcage fully exposed to the air, indicating that it had lain there for a considerable time and was well advanced in decomposing.

By looking down at the corpse, my mind was brought back to Sea World in San Diego. There were seals there, all of them well-fed and looked after. How these seals died in their natural environment and then washed up on the beach, I would never know for sure. Instead, I could only theorise that they might have been infected by a seaborne virus. The very sight of several corpses lying washed up on the beach seems to support the virus theory.

Bill and I spent much of the day together on the Pacific coastline. It was so peaceful, so quiet and serene when compared to the bustle of the city, especially San Francisco, laden with tourists visiting so many of the attractions. Eventually, Bill drove me back to the city and to my hostel on Market Street, where we said farewell. The next time I heard his voice was over the phone in a restaurant a few miles from home, wishing me all the best in the future during my stag night in the autumn of 1999!

The rocky Pacific Coast

Rocky coast of North California.

Preparing for the Flight Home.

While Bill and I were strolling along the beach, deep in my heart I felt sad and my friend noticed it. When he asked what the matter was, I admitted my sadness at the thought of the need to fly back home. He understood, and he was sympathetic. This was the beginning of an emotional disorder known as post-holiday blues. Both backpackers and beach sunseekers can suffer from it. There was even an article about it in a travel magazine. One travel agent, Trailfinders, the agent I booked this holiday with, had just opened a department for counselling backpackers suffering from the blues and guiding them back to normal day-to-day living. To me, post-holiday blues means that I can't resume work for several days after the touchdown at London Heathrow Airport.

Hence, in 1995, 1997, and even after our honeymoon, I avoided the "Touchdown Sunday, back to work Monday" ethic. But that was the advantage of self-employment, to be my own boss, and leaving me to decide when to resume work without any risk of a reprimand or even dismissal. However, a hidden danger within this way of thinking was that not showing up for too long a time would encourage my clientele to lose patience and switch to another window cleaner.

However, during a very severe bout of post-holiday blues in 1997, rather than seek counselling at a London travel agency, after landing at Heathrow Airport on a Wednesday morning on a flight from Los Angeles, the silence in my apartment was overbearing! After ten weeks out of the UK, I was so used to the daily social bustle in the hostel, that I couldn't cope with the silence. The best decision I made was to phone a friend who lived a couple of miles away and announce that I had just arrived home and I felt emotionally strained. The wife invited me over. So, almost immediately, I cycled to Tim and Sharon's, and at their home, I gradually found my bearings as I shared my experience. On Monday, four days after landing, I was ready for work. 

During my final morning in San Francisco, I booked a minibus to collect me and take me to the airport. The minibus calls at the hostel every morning and I watched other backpackers carry their knapsacks as they boarded the bus. Now it was my turn. The Grand Central Hostel was the only hostel I had ever stayed in where such a service operated. For a fee, paid at the reception, getting to the airport was straightforward.

I made it to the airport for the 12:00 p.m. flight to London Heathrow. However, at check-in, I was told that there would be a six-hour delay before take-off. This was due to the plane suffering from a six-hour delay before it took off from London Heathrow to get here.

Rather than feeling frustrated over the delay out of San Francisco, Instead, I felt a degree of pity for those stuck at Heathrow for six hours when they should have been soaring high in the sky as they looked forward to the start of their holidays. However, having already checked in, I couldn't leave the airport departure lounge to return to the city. All I could do was mope around.

At last, that evening, we were called to the boarding gate. On board the plane, I got talking to a young man sitting next to me (I had a window seat) and we got talking. It was a Tuesday, and the plane was originally meant to land in London around 6:00 a.m. BST on a Wednesday. This gave the man sitting next to me enough time to get home, unpack, and go straight to work. But with the six-hour delay, he decided to take the rest of the day off. I thought, Heavens!

Thus, after arriving home to my empty apartment, post-holiday blues began to set in. It was less severe in 1995 than it was in 1997, therefore I was able to handle it adequately. Yet, in the long run, the whole trip was therapeutic after the disastrous three-month trip to Israel a year previously in 1994, when I was thrown out of Stella Carmel Christian Conference Centre, by the wish of just one hostile volunteer, Josephine. Any painful emotion I suffered during the months between 1994 and 1995 was eliminated by the 1995 trip to the USA, which so far, I rank as one of the best trips I had ever made and enjoyed.

If you wish to read again what occurred at Stella Carmel in 1994, it's Travel Biography - Week 54.

Countryside at San Andreas Lake.

Looking back, I could see how Providence worked everything out for my benefit, even if it involved a lot of emotional pain. If it wasn't for the cruelty thrown at me by Jo, and the dismissal from the Centre in 1994, this trip wouldn't have occurred. The Grand Canyon would have remained unvisited, unhiked. San Diego would remain unknown to me, and at Huckleberry Finn Hostel in St Louis, I wouldn't have met James. And what happens after that, which is still to come, will be, to me at least, mind-blowing!

Therefore, I'm not exaggerating when I say that the 1995 trip to the USA had healed my negative emotions the year earlier. Once again, I can look at the world with my eyes open and with a smile.

However, on the day I arrived home from Heathrow Airport, I was down with the post-holiday blues. It was a Wednesday and I didn't intend to resume work until the following Monday. So, that afternoon, a cycling trip to town was in order. I had some photographic film ready to be developed. For any younger readers of this site, in the nineties, all photography was with a camera loaded with a film roll or cassette. When all 36 snapshots were taken, the exposed film was taken to a pharmacy here in the UK, such as Boots Chemist. It took up to a week for the photos to come back, which I collected with the submission of a special receipt. Week 60 of this Biography has most of the 1995 Grand Canyon hike, all taken with a roll of film.

A fuller view of San Andreas Lake.

1995 was my third trip to the USA after 1977 and 1978 featuring San Francisco (Weeks 15 and 23 respectively.) At this point in writing, there will be two more trips to the USA still to come. But as for both the Grand Canyon and San Francisco, there have been no more visits to this day, mainly due to marriage. However, still to come include San Diego Santa Monica, and New York. Three places not yet visited include Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Boston. 

Here begins the quiet year, the interlude between two major trips. But I didn't spend 1996 moping and doing nothing. In the summer of that year, I attempted a hike on the West Coast Path from Bournemouth to Exeter. But I have deemed it a failure, even after arriving at Exeter. The cause of the failure? Illness.

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Next Week: 1996 - a year of contrasts. A sense of failure. And also wild excitement!